Memeorandum

December 23, 2012

CIA Acting Head Agnostic On Enhanced Interrogation

The acting CIA chief declared his agnosticism on the efficacy of enhanced interrogation in a letter to CIA employees discussing the new Bin Laden film:

The acting director of the C.I.A., Michael J. Morell, has criticized a new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, saying it exaggerates the role of coercive interrogations in producing clues to the whereabouts of the leader of Al Qaeda.

In a message sent Friday to agency employees about the film, “Zero Dark
Thirty,” Mr. Morell said it “creates the strong impression that the
enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention
and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Laden. That
impression is false.”

In fact, he said, “the truth is that multiple streams of intelligence
led C.I.A. analysts to conclude that Bin Laden was hiding in
Abbottabad,” the city in Pakistan where a Navy SEAL team killed him in
May 2011. “Some came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques,”
Mr. Morell wrote, using the C.I.A.’s euphemism for harsh and sometimes
brutal treatment that included waterboarding. “But there were many other sources as well.”

He said that “whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only
timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as
the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be
definitively resolved.”

So there were many information sources, including some based on enhanced interrogation. And since these were not controlled experiments, we have no way of knowing how the prisoners subjected to enhanced interrogation might have responded if treated differently.

The NY Times pretends there is no news here:

The message from Mr. Morell, who is considered a top candidate for the C.I.A. director’s job, comes days after a similar statement from three senators, including Dianne Feinstein,
Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, which will consider the confirmation of whomever President
Obama selects as C.I.A. director.

"Similar statement"? Here is the statement and the Times coverage. I don't know how you read either one and come away thinking enhanced interrogation provided anything useful. Here is the Times lead:

WASHINGTON — In an unusual Congressional critique of Hollywood moviemaking, three United States senators on Wednesday lambasted “Zero Dark Thirty,” the new fictionalized film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden,
calling it “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that
torture resulted in information that led to the location” of the
terrorist leader.

And a bit later:

Some human rights advocates have described the film as ambiguous on the
question of whether torture was useful, while others believe it implies
that torture produced some early clues.

The senators take the latter view and say the movie is “factually
inaccurate” and “has the potential to shape American public opinion in a
disturbing and misleading manner.”

So the impression that enhanced interrogation provided "some early clues" is "factually inaccurate" and may be "misleading" to the American public.

And that is really similar to the current admission that there were many clues that led to Bin Laden, some of which came from the enhanced interrogation program? Who is zooming whom?

Did Cioppino last year. One of the family favorites. Red wanted the Bolognese as it is one of her brother's favorites and he is not with us.

This year I remembered to get the ground veal last week as it always disappears before Christmas and no fresh supplies until after. Got the ground pork and chuck yesterday.

I do it where you cook out the milk and then you cook out the white wine liquid and then you add the tomatoes after blending them.

This is when I use that 13.5 Le Creuset pot. Very large surface. Bigger than any skillet. Of course when full I need hubby or son to lift it. Boy unavailable.

Ext-would love your feast of the 7 fishes recipes. We spent a month in Italy when kids were 5, 7, and just before 10. All my Italian cooking reminds them of that trip. We even had an apartment on the Tiber for a week just down from Castel San Angelo. Hubby would make boy omelettes with prosciutto and great cheeses and those eggs they keep on counter top. We were also only about 2 blocks from the Campo dei Fiore market where Red and I would go in morning and first saw artichokes with their long stems.

Porchlight--Thank you for that Larry Correia link--It says it all. I have bookmarked it to send to anyone who brings the subject up.
I do not own and have never owned a gun. I have on occasion shot BB guns (poorly) and in my one effort at skeet shooting I was humiliated by my daughter, sons, nephews, and sister-in-law. I have no interest in guns as tools or toys or equipment. I am the last person in America who would be directly inconvenienced by strict(er) gun control.
And yet virtually everything Larry Correia points out is and was glaringly obvious to me as basic common sense. It seems to me that one must be deliberately and wilfully obtuse to scream "gun control" as the appropriate response to the Sandy Hook horror. The willingness of so many to remain obstinately and willingly ignorant about this (and so much more) makes me despair (only for a moment!) for the future of this great nation.

And let us not leave out the carnage in Laos or what happened to the Hmong either.

But then the major issue the Left had with that war was that we were killing their fellow Communists. That anyone ever thought otherwise is more a testament to the effectiveness of their propagandists, and a failure to draw the necessary conclusions, than it is hypocrisy on their part.

Outside of Islam there is no bloodier force in history that modern Oligarchical Collectivism.